Call me a bad person, but this is my favorite DeLillo.

I understand what he accomplishes with the hyper-flat and parodically-inane dialogue during the White Noise period. Some of his jokes are truly hilarious. However, I have never truly engaged with his mature work.

This particular piece, on the other hand, has all the flaws exposed. He attempts to write a sort of countercultural post-Beat novel, incorporating a touch of his later style while satirizing life in an advertising firm.

He throws in some parodies of "real America" and a strange indie film, served cold.

Much of it doesn't quite work, but there are elements that do. It offers a messy yet interesting glimpse behind the mask that his prose later adopts.

Overall, it's a unique and somewhat flawed work that showcases DeLillo's experimentation and willingness to take risks in his writing.

Don DeLillo's first novel, "Americana," is a work that shows glimpses of greatness. It is filled with amazing sentences and paragraphs that are like precious veins running through the text. However, mining those moments requires some effort from the reader. There are long stretches where one can easily fall into auto-pilot reading, simply plowing ahead for the sake of page progress. This, unfortunately, rounds the rating down to 2 stars.

The story is basically about a 28-year-old TV executive named David Bell. He withdraws from his own world in a lazy and restless way and drifts into a discovery of a disconnected America through his personal cross-country film project. He undertakes this project on his way to a Southwestern film project for his real job, but he never actually gets to that job. In essence, "Americana" is plotless, stream-of-consciousness writing from the mind of an unsympathetic and often unfocused character.

To be honest, I found it quite difficult to understand DeLillo's point. Was it about the dark, funny distractions of modern America? Bell himself says, "what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation's soul." I guess that's close enough. The first half of this venture is somewhat amusing, but the second half drags. Characters come and go, and it's hard to tell who they are or what differentiates them. It's a bit like in Henry Miller's books, but with a lot less explicit content.

Despite its flaws, DeLillo clearly has a tremendous way with words, even at this early stage of his writing career. He would go on to write better works later, such as the masterful "Underworld" and the really good "Mao II." "Americana" is sometimes tedious, but it also has moments that stop you cold, like the following quotes: "This is the only country in the world that has funny violence." "He was a dagger of a man, a small jagged bad mood glinting in a corner." "the light lucky feeling of seeing a pretty girl with bare legs walking across a room behind a smile that says she likes being a woman being watched."

In conclusion, "Americana" is worth reading for its occasional luminous prose, but it ultimately fails as a novel. Even though I'm glad I read it, I struggled to describe what DeLillo was doing here. If the aimlessness in form is supposed to match the theme, then what is the entertainment value for the reader? How are we supposed to get involved? These are some of the questions that this promising but frustrating novel leaves unanswered.

The young and wealthy David Bell flees the New Yorkese well-being to shoot an anti-film; a documentary all in fixed frames, cuts and no dissolves, "a diametrical exercise intended to destroy every meaning".

It is a journey in the peripheral America, the America of the early '70s among moving crowds, newsreel images, immense open spaces and basements with low-voltage light bulbs; the domestic set is minimal, Fellini-esque and surreal dialogues and monologues, the advertising spot as the true inspiration.

The debut of the prolific word prestidigitator Don DeLillo is one of those books that go beyond the author's own intentions.

A book that remains within the intellectual perimeter of who writes it, after all, is not always a great book; the book that opens a thousand doors to fantasies and interpretations is often something great.

DeLillo's style seems molded for every literary speculation; a host of images, with the wise and acrobatic use of the word, to draw a thousand trajectories. A popular Joyce, with the big difference that the Irish master provides in a certain way obligatory paths, which shape the reader's culture, spurring the laziest to find the exact connections with mythology, philosophy, religion, etc.

DeLillo instead throws open his hundred windows on the modern world and its contradictions, playing on the bright and invasive images of TV, on the fragility and hardness of the American man, on the depressing deadly charge of sex in the USA. In a certain way - despite the finesse of his language - he becomes the object of distortion; he generously spreads his imaginary power, letting the research path of David Bell penetrate into the meanders of reflection and there undergo its transformation process.

Americana is the portrait of the less photogenic America, after all, of that beauty that hides an inner decay; the great lysergic illusion of '68, the great painful illusion of an external, carnal, intellectual search, doomed sadly to buy the return ticket.